


Between the Shadows and the Sea

by Cynder2013



Series: Mostly Unrelated PJO Fusion Fics [3]
Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, Wayward Children Series - Seanan McGuire
Genre: Alternate Universe - Wayward Children Fusion, Canon Asexual Character, Canon Trans Character, Corpses, Gen, Implied/Referenced Murder, Skeletons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-28
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-13 18:22:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29033121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cynder2013/pseuds/Cynder2013
Summary: When Percy Jackson was twelve years old he left this world behind for a land of gods and monsters. Now, he’s back, and he’s not the only one.
Series: Mostly Unrelated PJO Fusion Fics [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1682968
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	Between the Shadows and the Sea

Percy Jackson disappeared when he was twelve. When he was sixteen he came back and his stepfather shipped him off to boarding school, never to be seen again.

* * *

The new student is a boy. This is a strange thing. Were a person to look at the composition of Eleanor West’s school they would likely assume that it was girls only rather than co-ed. They would be wrong. It is circumstance, not choice, that causes this new boy to be outnumbered nearly six to one by his female peers, though some students at Eleanor’s would say that the two are the same thing.

The boy squints at the façade of the elegant country home he has been dropped off in front of by the taxi he’d gotten from the train station. He carries one battered suitcase that had once been black but has faded over the years to a grey blue. At least, he sees it as blue. His eyes aren’t used to so much light, it makes colours difficult. When they finally begin to water his sight is improved enough that he is able to read the sign hanging above the porch.

ELEANOR WEST’S HOME FOR WAYWARD CHILDREN

No Solicitations. No Visitors. No Quests.

The sign is something of a comfort. It tells him what he should expect when he crosses the threshold into the house. Wayward children. No visitors. No quests. It sounds not unlike his home. Foundlings. Promises. What belongs to the Sea will always return to the Sea.

There are shadows on the porch. Those are a comfort too.

It is a short journey from the drive to the door. Inside the house are more shadows and an older boy with a book in his hand sitting in an antique chair upholstered in a faded red that matches the roses on the wallpaper.

The boy looks up from his book. “Percy Jackson?” His Oklahoma accent wraps around his words like seaweed.

“Yeah,” Percy says. “Are you a student?”

The boy shrugs and stands, tucking his book under one arm. “Only technically. I’m Kade. I’m helping to run the school until my aunt gets a bit steadier on her feet. I should preface that by telling you we recently had some murders and...You look like you went to the Moors. Did you?”

“No,” Percy says. “Yes. I was in the Moors but I belong to the Sea.”

Kade is silent for a few seconds. “Okay, I’m going to want you to explain that more later, but for now how about I show you your room?”

“You believe me?” The question spills out of Percy’s mouth as harsh and sudden as a riptide. The little he’s heard about the school says that it promises to fix his delusions—delusions he doesn’t have—not play into them.

Kade smiles softly. “Of course I do. We’ve all been to impossible places. I went to a Fairyland. Your roommate went to an Underworld. Traveling to another world is the one thing everyone here has in common.”

* * *

According to Kade, Percy’s room is the darkest room in the house barring the basement, which is already occupied by a girl named Nancy. It has a tree outside the window that blocks most of the sunlight. He’s sharing it with a boy even paler than he is with black hair and dark eyes who looks younger than him but actually spent more than eighty years in his Underworld. Nico’s side of the room is a chaotic mess of intricately painted figurines, trading cards from at least three different games, and two in-progress games of chess that are balanced precariously on the top of his bookshelf and the inside of the window respectively. The whole room smells faintly of gingerbread, but Percy gets the feeling that has nothing to do with his roommate. Nico doesn’t seem like the gingerbread type.

“We can do your orientation after lunch,” Kade says. “Nico, please make sure you both get to the ballroom. Percy, please keep track of the time. Lunch is from twelve to one. After that you have to raid the kitchen, which is fine on the weekend but causes trouble when classes are in session.”

Percy nods. Kade looks from him to Nico one last time before leaving the room. The door has barely had a chance to close when Nico is suddenly a foot in front of Percy holding a fan of cards in his face. Percy holds back a yelp. Nico was on the other side of the room a second ago.

“Pick a card,” Nico says.

Very much wanting the other boy out of his personal space, Percy picks a card. He gets a glance at the artwork, a fish-like Pokémon he doesn’t recognize, before Nico snatches it back.

“Carvanha,” Nico says. “Are you a really good surfer who sold his soul to a demon?”

Percy doesn’t quite know how to respond to that. How did Nico get there from a Pokémon card?

“No,” he says eventually. “I’ve never surfed.”

He doesn’t belong on the surface of the water. He’s a swimmer, a shipwreck diver. He belongs so far under the sea that the waves forget he exists.

Nico hums. “Can you play poker?”

Percy can’t play poker, but since they end up playing with a mix of Magic: The Gathering cards and a tarot deck he figures it probably doesn’t matter. He keeps an eye on the time and tells Nico they should wrap it up at quarter to twelve. He doesn’t know how long it’s going to take to get to the ballroom.

Lunch consists of a make your own sandwich station laid out on a long table at the side of the ballroom. Percy piles two rolls with smoked salmon and calls it good. It’s similar enough to what he’d eat at home, when Tyson brings bread to the seashore and Triton drags fish up from the depths for them to share.

Gods and the Moon, he misses his brothers.

Several other students take their food and leave, but Nico heads for a table in the corner of the room where two other people are sitting. Percy follows him. Nico is the only person he knows other than Kade, who he doesn’t see anywhere, and he’s pretty sure if he leaves he won’t be able to get back to their room on his own.

“We’ve got another creepy kid,” Nico announces as he sits down.

The other boy at the table flashes Percy a grin. “Welcome to the dysfunctional family. I’m Christopher, this is Nancy.”

“I’m Percy.” Percy looks from Christopher to Nancy and the greeting he was going to say dies in his throat.

Nancy also has pale skin that speaks of a lifetime without sunlight. Her hair is bone white with five streaks of black on one side and her eyes are pale as sea glass. The only colour she’s allowed on her person is the flower shaped brooch with jewels resembling drops of blood that she’s used to pin her black cardigan closed.

Percy thinks she might be the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen.

“Sit down before you make things awkward,” Nico says. “Nancy is pretty, but she doesn’t date.”

Good to know.

A pink blush colours Nancy’s cheeks. Percy sits down.

“So, where’d you go?” Christopher asks. He says it so easily, like he’s asking about the weather, not an impossible journey. Percy supposes he’ll have to get used to the doors being as well known here as back home.

“The Moors,” Percy says.

Nancy freezes, becoming a living statue between one second and the next. She doesn’t even seem to be breathing.

“Yeah, maybe don’t go around telling people that,” Christopher says. “I mean, we’re fine because you’re one of us and Kade and Eleanor are fine because they don’t judge. For everyone else, you shouldn’t say the name or talk about it in detail if you don’t want to be looked at like you murdered someone’s roommate.”

“Just because he went somewhere that wasn’t sunshine and rainbows, doesn’t mean that he’s a murderer,” Nico says with surprising ferocity.

Christopher touches the skull-shaped pin on the lapel of his jacket. “I know. Believe me, I know. But remember when you told Mark that the newer dead in Loto can be tracked by following trails of moldering flesh? It’d be like that but worse.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Nico says.

Nancy sighs and her stillness melts away. “He tripped you in the halls for a week until Eleanor and Kade told him to stop.”

Nico takes a bite of his sandwich. “And?”

“Your Nonsense is giving me a headache,” Christopher says.

“Your girlfriend is a skeleton,” Nico says.

The number of questions Percy has goes up exponentially.

“Where did you go?” Percy asks. That seems like a good place to start.

“The Halls of the Dead,” Nancy says. “Logic.”

“Mariposa, the Kingdom of Skeletons,” Christopher says. “Logic and Rhyme. The Moors are high Logic and high Wicked.”

More questions. So many more questions.

Nancy smiles at Percy. “I know it’s confusing, but Kade will do his best to explain everything.”

“Until then, just go with it,” Christopher says. “You wouldn’t happen to be apprenticed to a mad scientist, would you?”

* * *

Orientation takes place in the attic, which contains the school’s archives, the communal wardrobe and supposedly Kade’s bedroom. Percy has his doubts about that last one. The only bed he can see is covered in books.

Kade tells him about the doors and the compass. Not a physical compass, more like shared shorthand that they use to describe the worlds they travelled. The major directions are Wicked and Virtue on one axis and Logic and Nonsense on the other. The minor directions are things like Whimsy, Wild, Reason, Linearity and Mariposa’s Rhyme. There are other labels for worlds too. The Halls of the Dead and Loto are Underworlds. Kade’s world, the Prism, is a Fairyland and Goblin Market. Mariposa is a Netherworld.

“What about the Moors?” Percy asks.

Kade shrugs. “We’re not sure. There have been enough other kids who went there that we have a pretty good idea of what it’s like, but what it’s like seems to be a cross between a Netherworld and a Mirror. It consistently aligns with Logic and Wicked though.”

Percy nods. From Kade’s descriptions, he thinks the Moors are more of a Mirror than a Netherworld. The again, he lived in the undying presence of the Drowned Gods. If he’d gone to the werewolf lords in the mountains or the protectorates on the heath with their balance of doctors and monsters, maybe he would know more of the Netherworld side.

“Do you have any other questions?” Kade asks. “Don’t worry if you don’t right now. The answers aren’t going to expire.”

Percy wants to ask how he can get home, back to Tyson and Triton and the abbey and the Sea, but he knows that no one else at the school would be here if they had a choice. If there was a sure-fire way to go back to the word where they belonged they wouldn’t be waiting.

“How often do people go back?” he asks instead.

Kade rubs the back of his head. “It’s hard to say. Since I’ve been here we’ve had four kids go back home. That’s less than one percent of the student body. But when people leave school? Unless they keep in contact we have no way of knowing what happens to them. Some doors can open for adults. Some doors only open once. We don’t know everyone who goes back.”

“Oh,” Percy says. What else is there to say?

Kade gives a reassuring smile. “Hey, there’s hope. Doors from the Moors close when you turn eighteen, right?”

Percy nods. His birthday is in August. It’s November now. He’s got a little more than a year and a half before he hits eighteen.

“Doors from here _to_ the Moors, on the other hand, don’t seem to have an age limit,” Kade says. “At least, that’s been my experience. You have a chance, assuming you want to go back.”

He wants to go back. He wants to go back to the Sea more than anything. He’s not meant to be here, in this world, dry and on land. He can survive it, but he can’t be truly happy here.

What belongs to the Sea will always return to the Sea. He’s going to go back. He’ll survive until then.

**Author's Note:**

> Does Percy seem more like someone who'd go to a Lake or a Drowned World? Yes. Do I have a reason for making his world the Moors? Yes. Was it so he and Nico could be spooky roommates? (Mostly) yes.


End file.
